Top 100 Quotes About Willa Cather
#1. Some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. - Willa Cather
Zoraida Cordova
#2. Nebraska was home to indigenous peoples for centuries. It became a state in 1867, and has produced an important literary figure, Willa Cather, as well as an investor said to be the world's second richest man, Warren Buffett.
Stephen Kinzer
#3. When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.Willa Cather
Willa Cather
#4. Thackeray's a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.
Truman Capote
#5. Willa Cather said that she write best when she stopped trying to write and began simply to remember.
Ralph Keyes
#6. In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
Willa Cather
#7. The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.
Willa Cather
#8. The children you don't especially need, you have always with you, like the poor. But the bright ones get away from you. They have their own way to make in the world. Seems like the brighter they are, the farther they go.
Willa Cather
#9. I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all.
Willa Cather
#10. Because he talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull from constant use.
Willa Cather
#11. There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer; that's my creed and I'll follow it to the end, to a hotter place than Pittsburgh if need be.
Willa Cather
#12. Some people's lives are affected by what happens to their person or property, but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts
that and nothing more.
Willa Cather
#13. You must pray for him, my child. It is to such as he that our Blessed Mother comes nearest.
Willa Cather
#14. Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?
Willa Cather
#15. Alexandra sighed. I have a feeling that if you go away, you will not come back. Something will happen to one of us, or to both. People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find. What I have is yours, if you care enough about me to take it.
Willa Cather
#16. Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
Willa Cather
#17. That was the first time I ever saw Anton Jelinek.
Willa Cather
#18. What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
Willa Cather
#19. The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
Willa Cather
#20. Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
Willa Cather
#21. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like a bush that burned with fire and was not consumed.
Willa Cather
#22. She was like someone in whom the faculty of becoming interested is worn out.
Willa Cather
#23. Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
Willa Cather
#24. In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.
Willa Cather
#25. I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.
Willa Cather
#26. She began to wonder whether she would not do better to finish her life alone. What was left of life seemed unimportant.
Willa Cather
#27. Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear
ourselves! Until then we have not lived.
Willa Cather
#28. People always think the bread of another country is better than their own.
Willa Cather
#29. Constant comparisons are the stamp of the foreigner; one continually translates manners and customs of a new country into terms of his own, before he can fully comprehend them.
Willa Cather
#30. ...Now did you ever hear of a young feller's having such hard luck, Mrs. Burden?"
Grandma told him she was sure the Lord had remembered these things to his credit, and had helped him out of many a scrape when he didn't realize that he was being protected by Providence.
Willa Cather
#31. It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?
Willa Cather
#32. Of course Nebraska is a storehouse of literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see.
Willa Cather
#33. The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.
Willa Cather
#34. Poor soul, poor soul!' grandmother groaned. 'I'd like to think
Willa Cather
#35. . . . she had always the power of suggesting things much lovelier than herself, as the perfume of a single flower may call up the whole sweetness of spring.
Willa Cather
#36. Be generous with yourself. Don't stop short of splendid things.
Willa Cather
#37. It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.
Willa Cather
#38. Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.
Willa Cather
#39. In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way; but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.
Willa Cather
#40. Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
Willa Cather
#41. Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.
Willa Cather
#42. Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time.
Willa Cather
#43. As far as we could see, the miles of copper red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of day
Willa Cather
#44. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!
Willa Cather
#45. Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.
Willa Cather
#46. Her rapid footsteps shook her own floors, and she routed lassitude and indifference wherever she came.
Willa Cather
#47. what unprotected faces they were; their very roughness and violence made them defenseless. These boys had no practiced manner behind which they could retreat and hold people at a distance.
Willa Cather
#48. Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
Willa Cather
#49. A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.
Willa Cather
#50. I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping ... Alone,
Willa Cather
#51. I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.
Willa Cather
#52. If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.
Willa Cather
#53. About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women's faces, at the very bottom of my memory. "I'll
Willa Cather
#54. Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Willa Cather
#55. The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world.
Willa Cather
#56. The truth is, it is enough to live in this country. Just to live. Work isn't necessary for the salvation of the soul.
Willa Cather
#57. I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now.
Willa Cather
#58. The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.
Willa Cather
#59. There was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her face, and her colors still gave her that look of deep-seated health and ardor.
Willa Cather
#60. No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
Willa Cather
#61. He looked up quietly. "You know, don't you, Thee, that I think you are just the finest thing I've struck in this world?"
The tears ran down Thea's cheeks. "You're too good to me, Ray. You're a lot too good to me," she faltered.
Willa Cather
#62. The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.
Willa Cather
#63. Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
Willa Cather
#64. Sometimes I rode north to the big prairie-dog town to watch the brown earth-owls fly home in the late afternoon and go down to their nests underground with the dogs.
Willa Cather
#66. From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted; and nobody knew why.
Willa Cather
#67. There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
Willa Cather
#68. And I advise ye to think well, he told her It's better to be a stray dog in this world than a man without money. I've tried it both ways, and I know. A poor man stinks, and God hates him.
Willa Cather
#69. It seems to me that the pleasure one feels in a work of art is just one thing that one does not have to explain.
Willa Cather
#70. Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there - that, it seems to me, is created.
Willa Cather
#71. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is.
Willa Cather
#72. How easy it would be to dream one's life out in some cleft in the world.
Willa Cather
#73. The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.
Willa Cather
#74. The wild roses were wide open and brilliant, the blue-eyed grass was in purple flower, and the silvery milkweed was just coming on.
Willa Cather
#75. prayed for the poor and destitute in great cities, where the struggle for life was harder than it was here with us.
Willa Cather
#77. Things away from home often look better than they are.
Willa Cather
#78. He knew he would always remember her, standing there with that expectant, forward-looking smile, enough to turn the future into summer.
Willa Cather
#79. He used to say that he never felt the hardness of the human struggle or the sadness of history as he felt it among those ruins. He used to say, too, that it made one feel an obligation to do one's best.
Willa Cather
#80. One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.
Willa Cather
#81. Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.
Willa Cather
#82. I tell you there is such a thing as creative hate.
Willa Cather
#83. How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!
Willa Cather
#84. As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.
Willa Cather
#85. She took off her jacket and sat more at ease in her blouse, of some soft, flimsy silk.
Willa Cather
#86. You either have to be utterly common place or else do the thing people don't want, because it has not yet been invented. No really new and original thing is wanted: people have to learn to like new things.
Willa Cather
#87. Montaigne says somewhere that in early youth the joy of life lies in the feet.
Willa Cather
#88. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
Willa Cather
#89. I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister
anything a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.
Willa Cather
#90. In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart.
Willa Cather
#91. I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
Willa Cather
#92. Her secret? It is every artist's secret
passion. That is all. It is an open secret, and perfectly safe. Like heroism, it is inimitable in cheap materials.
Willa Cather
#93. In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance; from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.
Willa Cather
#94. Everywhere the grain stood ripe and the hot afternoon was full of the smell of the ripe wheat, like the smell of bread baking in an oven. The breath of the wheat and the sweet clover passed him like pleasant things in a dream.
Willa Cather
#95. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
Willa Cather
#96. Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.
Willa Cather
#97. Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.
Willa Cather
#98. Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.
Willa Cather
#99. People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.
Willa Cather
#100. One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap Diamant gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him.
Willa Cather
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